Koru Kids

Client
Koru Kids. A live client project at General Assembly, London 2017.

Brief
Create a simple way for Koru Kid’s nannies to submit their time sheets.

Challenge
Create an innovative and simple solution for users to submit their time sheets, requiring simple and light development from Koru Kid’s IT team. Final design must aim to minimise the 40% error rate caused by the third party type form currently being used by staff.

Solution
An innovative mobile first design that would cater to the 60% of users submitting their time sheets through a mobile device. The design also supports user behaviour of logging hours daily and eliminates the need for any calculation of hours, with consistent formatting throughout to avoid the input of dates, hours or family names incorrectly.

Duration 
2.5 weeks

My Role
UX Designer – Group project. My responsibilities included user interviews | User journeys | Contextual research | User interview scripts | Design studio sketching | Wireframing | Paper prototype design | User testing | Iterations | High fidelity designs on Sketch | Design of presentation slide templates. 

Tools
Marvel | Invision | Sketch | Omnigraffle | Sharpies | Paper | Design studios | Trello Kanban board | Google Drive

Methodologies Used
Daily standups | Contextual research | User research and interviews | Empathy maps | Personas | User stories and journeys | Rough sketches | User flows and scenarios | Wireframes and sketches | Clickable prototypes | Usability testing and results | Scrum.

Team
Gregg Southgate, Kate Huentelman and Marra Blijd and myself.

The Client

Since its start in January 2016, Koru Kids have revolutionised modern day childcare in London by helping families arrange a nanny share with another local family. A nanny share is when two families share the services of one nanny, spreading the cost between them and giving their children a much higher quality of childcare for little more than the cost of your average day nursery.

Koru Kids have been incredibly successful and had outgrown the current system used by nannies to submit their hours. They wanted an innovative and simple solution for their nannies to do this, requiring simple and light development from their IT team. Prior to our meeting at Koru Kids, we created a project canvas as a team in order to organise the next two weeks. While also setting our expectations and strengths within the team.

Contextual Research

We conducted four tests on the current system with nannies who were actively using the type forms and nannies who were in training. Each was given a shift pattern to input into the online form, we set up screen recordings to log our findings.

Key Findings from Contextual Research

• Open text fields on question five were resulting in incorrect entry of dates and time entry

• Calculation of shifts and total hours in question six was requested in a different format

• All four of our participants made errors when inputting shifts

• The change of format from hours and minutes into total hours as decimals in question six (i.e. 2 hours 45 minutes translating to 2.75 hours) caused incorrect maths calculations

• Participants relied heavily on third party devices, such as calendars and calculators to enter and total the hours

“Excel could have done this for me” Aislin — Trainee nanny for Koru

“I didn’t realise I was going to have to do the maths” Aislin

“ I’m dyslexic, so I find these questions quite long ” Lucy — Koru Nanny

“The process is okay once you get your head around it” Katisha — Koru Nanny

Experience Map 

User Interviews

We created an online screener survey to locate childcare professionals to interview. The current system was clearly creating a number of problems, but we wanted to dig in deeper and really find out about the nannies own habits surrounding how they logged their hours to create something intuitive and useful for them to use. From 16 user interviews these were the three key themes.
 

Theme 1: Logging Habits

• The nannies preferred to log their hours daily

• Nannies logged their hours at home or immediately at the end of their shift

• Methods used included traditional paper diaries, phone calendars and note applications

• Nannies on regular shift patterns rounded up shifts worked at the end of the week

• Nannies that worked more frequent shifts logged their hours more often
  

Theme 2: Timesheet Submittal Habits

• Nannies refer to calculators to work out their total hours

• Nannies submit hours weekly or less to other agencies

• Non Koru nannies typically use a desktop to submit hours due to the clarity of the larger screen

• Koru nannies are more likely to use a smaller screen device such as a tablet or phone to submit hours

• All nannies felt that if left any longer than a week, it was easy to forget what hours they had worked
  

Theme 3: Trust

• The trust and appreciation between the nannies and the families they worked for

• Misunderstandings over hours worked were extremely rare, consisting of nannies failing to submit shifts altogether, which the parents would flag to Koru

Empathy Maps & Personas

We created empathy maps from our interview findings to break down the information and help us get into the nannies' mindsets. Our users could be categorised into three proto personas

• Full time nannies

• Part time nannies studying related subjects

• Part time student nannies studying non-related subjects

Because the Koru nannies were mostly young female students, our primary users were rarely full time. We had been informed in the kick off meeting that part time student nannies helping families juggle school pick up and drop off times were their core business, and based our personas on this. Our primary persona became Melanie, our non career part time nanny, who was the best representation of Koru Kid’s employees.

The Solution

Based on our research we would focus our efforts on solving the following issues: 

• An innovative mobile first design that would cater to the 60% of nannies already submitting their time sheets through a mobile device

• Support user behaviour of logging their hours daily

• Eliminate the need for any calculation of hours

• Keep format consistent throughout to avoid the ability to input dates, hours or family names incorrectly

• Enable nannies to submit time sheets weekly to avoid long periods between submittals and therefore less room for error

• Allow user to differentiate the shared and non-shared shifts

• Ability to enter multiple shifts on one day, for the ‘drop off and pick up’ nannies

Design Principles

• Simple - An intuitive straight forward process for the nannies to use.

• Helpful - Providing indicators such as notifications to remind nannies when timesheets are due.

• Reliable - Giving nannies the ability to use the system at any time and providing confidence that their details will be stored and retrievable for when they are needed.

The Design Studio

Our challenges going into the design studio were to keep the development light and simple for the Koru Kids development team and work our solutions into a usable design. To generate ideas quickly as a team, we returned to the Koru Kid’s offices and carried out a design studio session with Rachel and An and focused on specific challenges to solve our main problems. After several rounds of critique and iteration, we came out of the session with refined versions of some of our best ideas, and created a user flow to build our wireframes around the following scenario:

Melanie needs to log her hours at the end of her shift and add an expense and additional hours later that day for a shared nanny shift. 

Our refined sketches mimicked the model of the paper diaries nannies currently relied on to store and stay on top of their hours, as well as looking at options of how to display the stored shift information for easy retrieval later.

My Design Studio Sketches

Wireframes

Prototypes & User Testing

We tested our prototypes from early paper versions through to low, mid and high fidelity versions with a total of 22 users. These tests were carried out with both trainee nannies and full time employees of Koru Kids in addition to other users familiar with time sheets, such as contract workers for Transport For London and hospitality desk employees.

Prototype Iterations

Iterations - Logging Hours Page

The following iterations were made based on user feedback

• Nannies did not identify with our choice of wording on the CTA buttons, a card sorting exercise was carried out to explore more relatable titles

• Three CTA buttons on the homepage ‘save’, ‘submit hours’ and ‘view hours’ were reduced to two options, ‘log my hours’ and ‘View hours’ for clarity

• Option to input more data into the shift was added, such as expenses or additional family names, to cover any cases where a nanny might be covering a shift for another family

• Logging hours homepage replaced with a dashboard to help with site navigation

Iterations - History View

• On screen calendar removed, as users failed to notice the highlighted week in addition to the calendar using up too much screen space

• The arrows indicating the user could scroll back and forth, week to week was intuitive enough, but required the user to click back over 25 times to access a shift from six months ago and clearly needed a redesign. An additional monthly scroll was added to the screen but with four buttons the design felt clumsy, so we returned to the drawing board to come up with what would be our final version.

• Our final design gave the user a clear overview of the history

• The user could now scroll down an infinite list of worked weeks in chronological order and click on any week to be displayed the individual days

• The history view would also display the current week at the top, with the timesheet submittal deadline shown next to a red marker

Style Guide

Koru Kids had supplied us with their new branding, marketing and style guide. Having recently rebranded across all platforms, we wanted to stay within th­ese guidelines regardless of this being an internal system taking into consideration colours that would meet with accessibility standards.

The Final Design

Our final mobile first design now caters to the 60% of users already submitting their time sheets through a mobile device. The design also supports the user behaviour of logging hours daily and stores them to be submitted directly to Koru Kids from the system. There is no longer a need for users to calculate total hours as this is done automatically and family names are preloaded into the design as a tick box option to limit errors, therefore allowing two family names to be selected to indicate any shared nanny shifts. Consistent formatting throughout also limits the ability to input dates, hours or family names incorrectly.

Presenting to the Client

On the final day of our 2.5 week design sprint, we presented our research, designs and a walk through the prototype in a 20 minute presentation to Rachel Carrell (CEO of Koru Kids), An Nguyen the head of operations and Michael, Koru's head of technology. The presentation was held at General Assembly's London campus. 

Client Testimonials

Next Steps

As with every short design stint, there are certain features I would have loved to have added to our design if we had more time. These are just a few:

• The nanny diary - Nannies could use the app to note future shifts and keep on top of their schedules, much like a calendar.

• The auto fill feature - Based on the above. Fields could auto populate shifts based on calendar entries to be edited by the nanny from ‘log your hours’ screen.

• Photos - The ability to add photos of receipts for expenses incurred by the nannies against any shift.